CleanJoule’s Cap Table Strategy: When Your Investors Should Be Your First Customers

Most founders think about fundraising and sales as separate motions. Close the round, then find customers. Build the cap table, then build the pipeline.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Mukund Karanjikar, CEO of CleanJoule, a sustainable aviation fuel producer that’s raised $55 million, revealed a different approach: his Series A investors were simultaneously his first major customers. Three airlines from three different countries didn’t just write checks. They signed binding agreements to purchase millions of gallons of fuel that wouldn’t exist for years.

This wasn’t creative deal-making. It was strategic cap table construction that collapsed fundraising and GTM into a single motion. And for deep tech and hardware founders facing long commercialization timelines, it offers a blueprint for turning your investor base into distribution infrastructure.

The Traditional Cap Table Mistake

When most founders construct their cap table, they optimize for two things: valuation and value-add. They want investors who will pay the highest price and provide the most useful connections, advice, or follow-on capital.

What they don’t optimize for is strategic alignment at the business model level. The investor whose fund strategy requires a 10x exit in seven years may provide excellent advice, but their incentives don’t align with a business that requires 15 years to reach commercial scale.

For CleanJoule, this misalignment would have been fatal. Sustainable aviation fuel requires massive infrastructure investments, regulatory approvals, and ecosystem coordination. Airlines needed to commit to purchasing before CleanJoule could justify building manufacturing capacity. And those commitments needed to happen years before the first gallon would be produced.

“We were very selective in type of investors we choose because that money is for future performance,” Mukund explains. “It’s not truly for past performance.”

The Strategic Investor Framework

When CleanJoule raised their Series A in 2023 after 14 years of government-funded development, the cap table composition told a deliberate story.

Three airlines participated: Frontier Airlines based in the US, Volaris headquartered in Mexico City, and Wizz Air in Hungary, Eastern Europe. Geographic diversity wasn’t accidental. It demonstrated global demand and de-risked single-market concentration.

But the critical element wasn’t the investment itself. It was what came with it.

“Not only our airlines gave us what we call off tech agreements, meaning they agreed to buy large volume of what we produce at a future date,” Mukund says. “They also participated in our series a strategic investment raise.”

This is the strategic investor framework: investors who have skin in the game both as equity holders and as customers. Their returns don’t just depend on your ability to build technology. They depend on your ability to deliver product they’ve already committed to purchasing.

Why This Alignment Matters

The dual commitment structure creates incentive alignment that pure financial investors can’t replicate.

A traditional VC firm might push for faster commercialization to hit fund timelines. An airline that’s signed an offtake agreement understands that rushing production before solving technical challenges creates fuel they can’t use and commitments they can’t fulfill. Their incentive is for you to get it right, not to get it fast.

This matters enormously for deep tech companies where technical risk can’t be eliminated through iteration speed. You can’t MVP your way to viable sustainable aviation fuel. The molecules either work in jet engines at scale or they don’t. Airlines understand this because they live with the consequences.

“You need those strategic partnerships because you are in it for that long haul,” Mukund explains. The long haul he’s referring to isn’t just development time. It’s the entire commercial lifecycle, from first production through scale manufacturing and geographic expansion.

The Lead Investor’s Domain Expertise

Beyond the strategic airline investors, CleanJoule’s Series A was led by Indigo Partners, an aviation-focused investment firm led by Bill Franke, who Mukund describes as “an absolute visionary.”

This wasn’t a generalist VC firm making a climate tech bet. Indigo Partners lives in aviation infrastructure. They understand aircraft economics, fuel supply chains, and the regulatory environment that governs both. When they evaluate CleanJoule’s technology, they’re not guessing about product-market fit. They have decades of domain expertise.

The value isn’t just smart capital. It’s that Indigo Partners can open doors at airlines, understand technical objections in real-time, and provide strategic guidance rooted in aviation industry dynamics rather than generic startup advice.

Climate-Aligned Capital

The round also included Gen Zero, the climate tech investment arm of Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and Clean Hill Partners, a private equity firm focused exclusively on decarbonization investments.

These investors operate on different timelines than traditional venture funds. Sovereign wealth funds can take 20-year positions. Climate-focused PE firms evaluate investments based on carbon impact metrics, not just IRR. Their incentive structures align with solving the actual problem, not just building a company that can exit quickly.

“The funding round was led by Indigo Partners out of Arizona. They are a very prolific player in aviation,” Mukund explains. “Gen Zero, which is climate tech investment arm, sustainability based, focused investment arm of Temasek, the fund out of Singapore, they are an investor as well. And then another private equity firm out of New York, Clean Hill Partners, whose whole objective is decarbonization investment.”

How to Construct a Strategic Cap Table

For hardware and deep tech founders, CleanJoule’s approach offers tactical lessons:

First, identify who needs your technology to succeed at their own strategic objectives. Airlines need sustainable aviation fuel to hit net zero commitments by 2050. Those aren’t nice-to-have goals. They’re board-level mandates backed by regulatory pressure and customer demand.

Second, approach those entities not just as customers but as potential investors. The pitch isn’t “buy our product.” It’s “invest in solving your existential problem while securing supply of the solution.”

Third, structure deals that create mutual dependency. Offtake agreements give you revenue visibility and production targets. Equity stakes give customers incentive to support your success beyond the contracted volumes.

Fourth, find a lead investor with deep domain expertise in your specific market. Not climate tech generally. Not hardware broadly. Your specific vertical. For CleanJoule, that meant aviation infrastructure investors, not generalist climate VCs.

The Offtake Agreement Advantage

The offtake agreements CleanJoule secured weren’t just customer validation. They were GTM infrastructure that solved multiple problems simultaneously.

From a financing perspective, committed future revenue makes it easier to raise growth capital and debt financing. Banks will lend against contracted cashflows in ways they won’t against projected sales.

From a manufacturing perspective, offtake agreements justify building production capacity. You’re not building a factory and hoping customers appear. You’re building to fulfill committed demand.

From a strategic perspective, having airlines as both investors and customers means they’re incentivized to help you succeed. They’ll provide feedback on fuel specifications, navigate regulatory approvals, and potentially provide access to testing facilities and distribution infrastructure.

When Strategic Investors Say No

Not every potential customer should be an investor. Mukund’s selectivity about investor composition wasn’t just about getting the best terms. It was about ensuring every investor brought strategic value beyond capital.

“If you look at the standard news release we had about our fundraising in 2023, we have three different airlines,” Mukund notes. Three airlines, not ten. Each from a different geography, each bringing unique strategic access.

The principle: more strategic investors isn’t better. The right strategic investors with complementary capabilities and non-overlapping markets is optimal.

The Timeline Advantage

Perhaps the biggest advantage of CleanJoule’s cap table strategy is timeline alignment. When your investors are your customers, and those customers have made 2050 commitments that depend on your technology, everyone’s working on the same time horizon.

There’s no pressure to show quarterly growth when your customer-investors understand that commercial manufacturing doesn’t start until 2029. There’s no tension about burn rate when strategic investors know that rushing production would compromise the fuel specifications they need.

“Money raising is not a reflective exercise. It’s very prospective, it’s what you raise it for, what you need to do in the future,” Mukund says.

For CleanJoule, the future required patient capital from parties who would benefit from the company’s success as both equity holders and customers. That’s not a cap table. That’s a GTM strategy disguised as fundraising.

For deep tech founders, the lesson is clear: before you optimize for valuation or even value-add, optimize for strategic alignment. Your cap table isn’t just a funding mechanism. It’s the foundation of your go-to-market motion.